Indicator | Uninsured | Insured
Does not have a usual source of care | 51.4% | 20.2%
No routine check-up in past year | 55.0% | 26.3%
No doctor visit in past year | 47.4% | 20.2%
ED visit in past year | 17.0% | 23.5%
Delayed getting needed medical care | 12.4% | 11.7%
Delayed filling prescription | 10.7% | 10.1%
Delayed medical care due to cost | 10.1% | 5.6%
Delayed filling prescription due to cost | 8.7% | 6.0%
One of the nation’s most preventable diseases is killing newborns in ever-increasing numbers.
Nationwide, 1,306 infants acquired syphilis from their mother in 2018, a 40% rise over 2017, according to federal data released last week. Seventy-eight of those babies were stillborn, and 16 died after birth.
Should health plans do more to support parents in raising stable families?
That’s the recommendation from a coalition of child health researchers who are calling for an overhaul of part of the state’s Medi-Cal program.
Sutter Health has reached a tentative settlement agreement in a closely watched antitrust case brought by self-funded employers, and later joined by the California Attorney General’s Office. The agreement was announced in San Francisco Superior Court on Wednesday, just moments before opening statements were expected to begin.
Medicare Advantage and Medicaid insurer Brand New Day, which is better known as Universal Care, was fined $200,000 by the Department of Managed Health Care falling significantly below tangible net equity (TNE) requirements last year.
Alex Briscoe didn’t know much about how local governments pay for mental health care when he joined Alameda County’s Health Care Services Agency in 2004. But he knew there was a problem.
Briscoe had come from a job at Children’s Hospital Oakland where he saw kids routinely turn up in the emergency room in serious psychological distress. These children had nowhere else to go. There was no support system to help kids who’d experienced trauma, or to catch mental health problems before they escalated, Briscoe recalled.
A new California law that reclassifies some independent contractors as employees, requiring they be offered a range of benefits and worker protections, will likely expand health insurance coverage in the state, health policy experts say.
But it might end up harming some workers.
The homeless in California and 14 other states are beset by both physical and mental health issues at a rate far higher than the population as a whole, according to new research by the California Policy Lab at UCLA.
The study concluded that half of those homeless simultaneously suffer from a medical, mental health and substance abuse issue simultaneously, what the researchers referred to as a trimorbidity. By comparison, only 2% of those who have housing suffer from such a trimorbidity.
Sutter Health and the California Attorney General will lay out their opening arguments today in an antitrust trial in San Francisco Superior Court.
Attorney General Xavier Becerra joined a suit last year initially filed by a labor union against Sacramento-based hospital chain Sutter Health. The suit claims that Sutter has caused healthcare prices in Northern California to be significantly higher than in Southern California, particularly through business tactics such as “take it or leave it” contract offers and other business tactics.
Metro Area / 2016 HHI* / Change in HHI since 2012
San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA / 0.2863 / -0.0125
San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward, CA / 0.2232 / +0.0571
Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA / 0.1634 / +0.0980
San Diego-Carlsbad, CA / 0.3137 / +0.0138
Oxnard-Thousand Oaks-Ventura, CA / 0.2276 / +0.0072
Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario, CA / 0.0788 / +0.0090
2018: 2,826 (in thousands); 7.2%
2017: 2,797 (in thousands); 7.2%
Change: 29 (in thousands); 0.1%
Source: US Census Bureau, Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2018
It’s not uncommon for Ilan Shapiro, M.D., to confront ailments in his child and teen patients that defy a straightforward medical explanation.
At his practice at AltaMed Health Services in Los Angeles, the pediatrician has treated children with insomnia, teens whose hair is falling out and kids who have stopped trying in school, despite being academically capable. Often, these children are struggling with depression, anxiety and stress. But there’s also a deeper, less tangible cause, Shapiro said.
Down in the Louisiana bayou, Gary Wiltz, M.D, is wondering how he’s supposed to run 14 community health centers and treat 30,000 patients without a large chunk of federal money. Again.
As happened in 2017, Congress is on the precipice of failing to meet the Sept. 30 deadline for reauthorizing the Community Health Center Fund that supports nearly 1,400 community health centers, which treat more than 27 million predominately poor patients.
Blue Shield of California is working with the Blue Cross Blue Shield Institute and ridesharing service Lyft to provide free rides to providers.
The program, known as rideQSM, is a pilot project limited to Blue Shield’s Sacramento market for now. More than 1,000 enrollees in the San Francisco-based Blue Shield’s health plans in Sacramento are eligible for the rides, which require an SMS-enabled phone.
Alignment Health Plan, an Orange-based Medicare Advantage health insurer, said it was expanding into eight counties in the Bay Area and Sacramento regions for 2020. The counties where it will offer coverage are Marin, Placer, Sacramento, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Cruz, Sonoma and Yolo counties. The company said in a statement that 862,000 Medicare Advantage enrollees currently reside in those counties. They may choose alignment during the traditional 2020 Medicare enrollment period, Oct. 15 through Dec. 9.
A study from the University of Washington studied 92 hospital closures in California between 1995 and 2011. As a group, the closures didn’t show much impact on mortality rates. However, estimating differential impacts of rural and urban closures shows that rural closures increase inpatient mortality by 0.46% points (an increase of 5.9%). Results differ across diagnostic conditions: rural hospital closures increased mortality for stroke patients by 3.1% and for AMI (acute myocardial infarction) patients by 4.5%, and decreased mortality for asthma/COPD patients by 8.8%.
Hospital / Closure Year / Number of Beds
Adventist Health Feather River (Paradise) / 2018 / 100
Coalinga Regional Medical Center / 2018 / 22
Corcoran District Hospital / 2013 / 32
Kingsburg Medical Center / 2010 / 15
Source: UNC: The Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research
California residents who have minor healthcare issues will choose providers based primarily on cost, according to a new study by UCLA researchers.
More than 5,000 employees of UC Irvine were queried in the latter part of 2016 for the study, which led to the researchers creating a simulation model suggesting where care would be sought. The UCI employee base is diverse enough to reflect a large number of demographic categories, according to the researchers.
Wesley Boyd, M.D., an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard, has spent years working with state programs that help doctors, nurses and other health care workers who have become addicted to opioids get back on their feet professionally.
Kaiser Permanente announced earlier this week it had announced a tentative labor agreement with 85,000 unionized employees -- 67,000 of whom are based in California -- thereby averting the threat of a strike that would have impacted large portions of the Oakland-based hospital system and health plan.
